One morning last fall, Chris Downey, an architect, ran his long white cane across a pair of floor-tile samples spread out at his feet in the San Francisco office of an architecture firm, SmithGroup. Gathered around him, a handful of architects watched. They wanted to know which tile he preferred for a new rehabilitation center for the blind at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto. Downey looked up at Eric Meub, a vice president at the firm—not at him, exactly, just over his shoulder. “The one on the right is distinctive in either direction,” Downey said. “The other one has a preferred direction.” For a blind patient still learning to use a cane, that first tile would give more-predictable feedback.

There was an awkward silence. The other architects looked at one another. Downey chuckled. “So you’re saying the one on the right is the one that doesn’t look so good,” he said, grinning.

Two and a half years ago, Downey had just started running the architecture practice at a stylish green-design firm. A few weeks after he took the job, he noticed something wrong with his vision. A tumor was wrapped around his optic nerve; he needed surgery right away. When he woke up, everything was blurry, but he could see. “Five days later,” he said, “it all went black.”

Downey returned to the office. But he couldn’t use design software. He couldn’t read plans. A few months passed, and the firm was caught up in the housing crash. Downey scheduled a talk with the owner, an old friend, to figure out how he could be more useful. He was at a workstation, up on a loft, when she came to see him, and he could tell by her footfalls that it wasn’t going to be the kind of conversation he had been planning to have.

San Francisco was full of laid-off architects. Downey could be pretty sure he was the only blind one. It turned out to be an interesting credential. SmithGroup and another firm, the Design Partnership, hired him as a consultant.

The architects stacked the tile samples out of the way and moved to a conference room. Plans covered a long table. Downey’s were printed in Braille dots, on big white sheets of stiff paper. Shortly before he was laid off, Downey had found a blind computer scientist who had devised a way to print online maps through a tactile printer; it worked for architectural drawings too. Meub would take Downey’s hand and guide it to details on the plans, as they talked. “He can’t just look at a drawing at a glance,” Meub told me later. “At first I thought, Okay, this is going to be a limitation. But then I realized that the way he reads his drawings is not dissimilar to the way we experience space. He’ll be walking through a plan with his index finger, discovering things, and damn, he’s walking through the building!”

Today they had to discuss a problem Downey had spotted with a nurses’ station at the end of a hallway. Downey explained how the space would appear to a blind patient: “Their cane will pass by the corner, they’ll realize, Corner, turn right, and they’ll walk right into the nurses, on the wrong side of the counter.” The simplest solution would be a gate, but Downey knew the space was meant to look open and airy, and a gate would look like a clumsy afterthought. Instead, they talked about a change in the texture of the floor. Something subtle that would still say: not a hallway.

“Okay,” Meub said, “bathrooms.” The plans specified sinks and toilets, but nothing more. “Ideally, I’d want the paper-towel dispenser and trash can recessed and near the sink,” Downey said. Otherwise, he explained, “you go in, wash your hands, now where’s the paper towel? You start feeling around the walls for the paper towel, and by the time you find it, you need to wash your hands again.” In a typical bathroom, the paper towels can end up anywhere, and when trash cans sit on the floor, cleaners will empty them and then put them back in a new spot. “Bathrooms are mysterious,” he said—especially institutional ones, like at airports and train stations. “And they’re all so different.”

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They talked through other issues. Load-bearing columns that seemed likely to snag a cane. A dramatic staircase that would deposit patients in the center of a big, disorienting room. And the courtyard. Plans showed a rectangular space, split down the middle. One half would be a sitting area, the other half a raised garden. But the garden they’d designed would be lost on the blind, Downey said. With everyone at one end, unaware of the garden view, the courtyard could feel claustrophobic. Instead, Downey suggested parceling out the garden, and then turning the seating area into paths and alcoves. That way, patients could apprehend the size of the courtyard, and explore the garden through touch and smell. He also suggested a fountain. It would cool the courtyard, he said, and the splashing sound would help patients perceive the space around them and orient themselves within it.

“As architects, we’re visual animals,” Downey told me. “The interesting riddle for me, then, is: if you take sight out of the equation, what makes for good architecture?”

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.

The shrugs that have met credible recent allegations of affairs by Donald Trump force a reconsideration of the post-Bill Clinton narrative about voter morality and politicians’ sense of shame.

Right up until 2016 or so, there was a clean narrative about political infidelity. Back in the day, the story went, politicians had affairs with abandon—John Kennedy, of course, but also Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and plenty others. (It’s a curiosity that Richard Nixon, the most famously unethical president, is one of the few without serious allegations of infidelity.)

The voters would have been appalled, of course, but the press discreetly ignored these infidelities, for whatever reasons—prudishness, excessive closeness to sources, whatever. When Jimmy Carter copped to having “committed adultery in my heart many times,” it was laughable, but not that that far beyond the puritanical mores of American society. Perhaps the press was wise to look away from mistresses to the presidents.